Sen. Eric Schmitt says federal agencies have been handing out citizenship documents to the children of foreign diplomats for decades, in defiance of a rule older than the interstate highway system, and he wants Marco Rubio and Markwayne Mullin to fix it.
The Missouri Republican sent a letter this week to Secretary of State Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Mullin demanding they investigate, and where necessary revoke, birth certificates, Social Security numbers and other citizenship paperwork improperly issued to children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. soil. The law here is not new or ambiguous. For more than a century, statutory law, judicial precedent and executive branch policy have held that children of accredited foreign diplomats born in the United States are not, in the words of the 14th Amendment, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," and therefore never acquire citizenship at birth in the first place. Schmitt's complaint is that nobody at the agencies actually issuing the paperwork seems to have gotten the memo.
His letter, obtained by Fox News and the Daily Caller, lays out a bureaucratic failure with a straightforward cause: no one checks. Local birth-certificate offices, the Social Security Administration and other agencies that generate citizenship-adjacent documents have no reliable system to flag when a newborn's parents hold diplomatic status before issuing paperwork that can later be used to claim citizenship. Schmitt points to a 2017 Korea Times report finding more than 100 children of South Korean diplomats alone had obtained birthright citizenship documents over the years, a number he says is almost certainly a fraction of the true total nationwide. He wants the State Department and DHS to investigate the full scope of the problem, identify everyone who received documentation they were never entitled to, and revoke it.
The mechanics of the problem are dull, which is exactly why it has persisted. A hospital or county clerk processing a birth certificate has no obligation, and often no way, to check whether the parents listed hold diplomatic immunity. Once that certificate exists, it becomes the foundation document for a Social Security number, a passport application, eventually a voter registration card. Each subsequent agency in the chain simply trusts the one before it. Schmitt's letter argues that trust has been misplaced for generations, and that nobody in Washington has bothered to build the cross-check that would catch it.
The State Department maintains a list of accredited diplomats and their dependents through the Office of Foreign Missions specifically so other agencies can verify status. Schmitt's letter argues that list is not being consulted where it matters, at the point of document issuance, which is precisely where the failure occurs.
The bigger fight over birthright citizenship
Schmitt's letter did not arrive in isolation. Two days earlier he introduced the American Citizenship Act, legislation that would narrow birthright citizenship to children born to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. That bill followed a Supreme Court ruling last month that blocked President Trump's executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders, a ruling Republicans in both chambers have openly criticized. Rep. Andy Ogles has introduced companion legislation in the House targeting birth tourism specifically, the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. for the sole purpose of giving birth on American soil to secure citizenship for their child. The Justice Department has separately signaled it intends to crack down on birth tourism operations in the wake of the ruling.
The diplomats' children issue is narrower than the broader birthright citizenship fight, and legally far less contested. Courts have never treated the diplomatic exception as ambiguous the way they have treated children of undocumented immigrants or visa holders. That makes it, in a sense, the easiest piece of the citizenship-integrity puzzle to fix. If federal agencies cannot even keep citizenship documents away from people who were never eligible under a rule nobody disputes, Schmitt's letter implies, the case for tightening enforcement everywhere else writes itself.
Schmitt has not put a hard number on how many diplomats' children may hold improperly issued documents nationwide. His letter relies on public reporting and legal scholarship to argue the total could run into the thousands, an estimate that is his own and has not been independently verified by the agencies involved. Whether Rubio and Mullin's departments respond with an actual audit, or let the letter sit in an inbox, will say a great deal about how seriously the administration takes citizenship integrity beyond the courtroom.
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